Recently, with improvements in communication infrastructures and advances in information communication techniques, online information providing services which use the Internet and the like can be provided. Many of conventional systems for providing such services demand the input of IDs from user terminals. If such an ID is constituted by only numerals, the ID can be easily input. In this case, however, as compared with a case wherein the same information is expressed by characters, the number of digits required becomes very large. This makes it inconvenient to notify or display the ID. In addition, the user has difficulty in memorizing the ID.
Recently, therefore, many systems are designed to issue IDs constituted by combinations of numerals and characters.
With improvements in communication infrastructures, users can access information providing systems even from terminals having no keyboard, e.g., cell phones and fixed telephones, other than computers.
No conventional information providing systems, however, have issued IDs in consideration of facilitating input from terminals without any keyboard.
When, for example, characters are to be input from a general telephone, three characters A, B, and C are assigned to the same button to which the numeral 2 is assigned. In general, when this button is pressed once, A is input; when pressed consecutively again, B is input; and when further pressed again, C is input. When a given button A is pressed several times first, and then another button B is pressed, a character assigned to the button A is input to the first character input column, and a character assigned to the button B is input to the next character input column. That is, when a different button is pressed, input by the preceding button is confirmed.
When a three-character string AEI is to be input by using such a telephone, the user presses button 2 once, button 3 twice, and button 4 three times. That is, the character string AEI can be input by pressing numeral buttons a total of six times. However, when a character string ABC, which is an alphabetical character string having the same number of characters as that of the above character string, is to be input, the user must presses buttons a total of eight times, i.e., once for button 2, once for the move button for character input columns, twice for button 2, once for the move button for the character input columns, and three times for button 2. That is, the input operation becomes complicated by the degree to which the move button for the character input columns must be pressed.
In addition, different operations are required to move character input columns depending on the types of telephones, and the position of the move button is not fixed unlike the numeral buttons. It therefore takes much time for a user to become accustomed to input operation.